“Facts – not ideology – determine reality,” the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) said in a warning to legislators and educators about the dangers of surgical and medical sex change operations to children.

“Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse,” the physicians said, “Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBTQ – affirming countries.”

The group, which aims at getting parents involved in their children’s health and education about health, said, “Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one,” and that, “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.”

To the contrary, the group maintained that human sexuality is a “binary trait” and said the XY and XX chromosomes that determine female or male sex are “genetic markers of health” not “genetic markers of a disorder.”

“No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex,” the statement said.

The American Academy of Pediatricians, the larger professional society from which the ACP broke away in 2002, has surgical and medical interventions in youth to suppress the hormones that naturally cause girls to grow into women and boys to men.

The ACP says this change in position has put American teens at higher risk for physical and mental illness. “Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous…as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the ACP pointed out, and noted that children who use puberty blockers to “impersonate the opposite sex” will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence that in turn can cause dangerous health risks such as high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

One of the statement’s authors is psychologist Paul McHugh. Drawing upon his clinical work with LGBTQ persons as chief psychologist at Johns Hopkins hospital and research as distinguished professor at the university’s medical school, McHugh has criticized what he sees as the American Psychological Association’s embracing of gender ideology at the expense of sound medical practice. McHugh authored an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned man-woman marriage laws in the U.S. last year.

Pro-LGBT groups criticized the ACP statement saying it would incite discrimination; one group called it an “attack on transgender children”. A public interest law firm labeled the ACP a “hate group” when it filed an amicus brief with the Alabama Supreme Court which favored exceptions to the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling knocking down U.S. laws protecting marriage as between a man and a woman.

Activists similarly criticized Pope Francis’ recent remarks to Polish bishops where he identified gender “ideology” as a form of “ideological colonization” and linked it to government corruption. He said, “Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this is terrible!”

Susan Fink Yoshihara is Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) Vice President for Research and Director of the International Organizations Research Group (IORG). Her research interests include intervention, human rights, and humanitarianism in international law and politics. She is the author of Waging War to Make Peace: U.S. Intervention in Global Conflicts (Praeger, 2010).

As I have written elsewhere, the ACP has done some good work, but their faulty description and understanding of the term “gender” actually coincides with many who wish to claim that it is a fluid concept.

The ACP statement on gender is the following:

“No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ or ‘somewhere in between’ do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.” (ACP)

This referring to gender as merely an awareness of oneself as male or female and not an objective stand-alone category not only plays into the hands of subjectivists and others who wish to promote the irrational claims of “transgenderism,” it’s also etymologically inaccurate and misleading. The roots of the term gender come from the Latin genus, which means kind, or kind of thing. As such, gender is objectively understood as the classification of organisms based on their sex. This being so, everyone is indeed born with a gender, which is either the male gender or the female gender, and it does not matter what they are aware of at birth. For crying out loud, who is aware of much of anything when they are born? Very sloppy work here on the part of the ACP.

In addition, if the term gender stood for merely the awareness of one’s maleness or femaleness, what is the point of adding the term identity or awareness to gender, since gender is already recognized as identity or awareness based on the ACP claim? Taking this further, how could one have a gender identity disorder? Wouldn’t it simply be a gender disorder based on the ACP claim? Yikes! Contradictions and all sorts of confusion abounds when gender is not properly recognized as the objective category denoting male or female as it does.

One more nail in the coffin of the ACP’s notion of gender. When people not suffering from a disorder do become aware of their biological sex as claimed, do they become aware of their awareness since this is the circular nature of the ACP definition?

Or is their gender awareness an awareness that they are part of a particular gender (male or female) that they have been part of all along?

Accordingly, referring to people who suffer from gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder as transgender persons or transgenders without at least putting such terms into quotation marks to indicate the lack of objective truth expressed by the terms alone grants such people a status of being they do not possess. There are no such things as transgenders or transgender persons, and to claim otherwise is a denial of reality and disservice to all.

john

Let’s expose the so-called “American College of Pediatrics for what it is — a small, conservative offshoot of the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics. In sum — The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a small, socially conservative advocacy group of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals in the United States. The group was founded in 2002 by a group of pediatricians, including Joseph Zanga, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as a protest against the AAP’s support for adoption by gay couples. The group’s membership has been estimated at between 60 and 200 members. In contrast to the AAP’s over 60,000 members.